Sony: PS3 has 360 beat on first-party titles, catching up rapidly on third-parties

Underdog. Come-from-behind victory. “Giant enemy crab.” Just a few years ago, Sony would never have associated itself with any of these phrases. But that’s all changed with the bumpy ride that is the PS3.

Now, though, after an extremely successful price cut, the once-humbled console maker seems to be back in the saddle of its high horse. Translation: time for some good old fashioned videogame exec trash talk.

“We do better for our publishing community than 360 does,” SCEA Senior Vice President of Publisher Relations Rob Dyer told Industry Gamers. “As our installed base starts catching up and gaining on 360, you’re going to see the publisher side much quicker get to par than even if we had the same number of [360 hardware] units.”

“So for instance, with a title like Madden, I think the index was 1.4 to 1.0, which meant we way oversold on PS3 versus 360, given the installed base. That’s only going to get better and better as the installed base continues to grow.”

Dyer also took Microsoft’s first-party branch to task, tearing its efforts limb-from-limb.

“They have very few first-party studios at Microsoft. Bungie’s next Halo is the last one, Rare rarely puts out anything, you’ve got Peter Molyneux with his Fable stuff… but they don’t have first-party development studios inside at Redmond or anywhere for that matter. We do. So rather than putting their money behind that, they’ve been going to Epic or Valve or BioWare to do what they did with Mass Effect, and that’s where they throw their dollars.”

“Candidly,” he added, “we’re not going to compete with Microsoft on that front, but what we have is a global business here. Our global business is bigger than 360’s and will continue to get bigger than 360, and people are seeing that. We passed them in Europe and they don’t even exist in Japan, and we’re going to catch them and pass them here in the U.S. as well.”